All posts tagged Beacon Blanket

I know that everyone remembers a few weeks ago when I was bragging about how we were gunna reupholsteran old 50’s chair withmilitary blankets from the Army/Navy store….

Well guess what?

We freaking did it! I told you that we would, and we did. So take that! Not everything around here is a half-done project….

Have a look-see….

Pretty Awesome , right?

OK, to be honest, it took 2 tries, but they finally got the cushions right. The old ones had piping…and I definitely did not want it on the new, young ones. So what did they do? They piped them. No worries though, it only took a day to reconstruct them.

I gave him all the written and visual instructions that I could think of…I even ran the stripe down the front in blue painters tape as an example. So he understood that I wanted it on the sides of the cushions and not just the fronts…..ohhh, and slightly off centered.

We bought 2 pretty good-sized blankets. I’m glad that we did. All 4 stripes on both blankets were slightly different widths. Yeah, that sounds like government issue detail work to me. One would have been plenty of fabric, but because I wanted the stripe worked into the cushions…I knew there would be a slight degree of difficulty, at least, more difficulty than I can endure sewing.

He hacked both blankets pretty well. But don’t fear, I saved ALL the scraps (cough”hoarder”), and I think that I can make a couple decent sized pillows if I need to.

“How much did it cost”, you say? Well that was kinda rude to ask……I can tell you that it was slightly less than the price of a new (vintage) chair, and about half of what my regular upholsterer we use for work projects would have charged. Besides, the new brown with red cushions are way esier to live with than the green-tragedy that it was before.

Oh, and just so you know that it is still me……Here’s the new chair with a Navajo pillow.

It has come to our attention that we don’t have enough pictures of our interior….So I promise you , gentle reader, that we will do our best to provide a decent house tour in the next couple of months…Even if the rooms aren’t quite where we want them to be ….just yet.

This is the room we spend most of our time in, so it is most fitting that it is, by far, the most complete room in our house …..You can see what it looked like the first time we walked in here…….

Here’s a close up of the coffee table, usually that basket is full of remotes…….even though we both have Uverse remote apps on our Ipads …go figure.

The coffee table I absolutely love ….it’s a huge glass cube. Just like to one Anthony Michael Hall was trapped under in “16 Candles”. If you’ve never seen that movie, you need to watch it right now … Seriously …. RIGHT NOW. This can wait.

Did you watch it? I KNOW!!!! GREAT movie , isn’t it???

So here’s a little more of the tour…..This is the view from the front hall.

If you close in on the tool box, you can see that we use the drawers for “tear-sheets”….which is wayyyyyyyy easier than saving 300 magazines and catalogues….trust me.

The toolbox came from the garage of an abandoned house my brother was remodeling.

The pillows were all made by me, except the bandanna ones, with scraps from work projects.

I can sew an A-Ma-Zing straight line. The Letterman’s patches I have been collecting for years (and have quite a few more…Quite a few). The big L, from my personal high school Letterman’s jacket, is on a pillow on the other side of the sofa.

Here’s a great shot of the mantle….Notice how John Lennon is just slightly bigger than Jesus, ( just like he said he was ).

The belt buckle in the shadow box was a prize Jamie won showing horses, my favorite because of the red coral Texas.

The brick fireplace was half-ass painted some kind of semi-gloss olive-beige when we first moved in. Jamie primed and painted between all those bricks for 2 days…pretty sure that the black paint is Ralph Lauren Granite in flat.

Speaking of chalkware Jesus, he was only 10 bucks at the Dolly Python, one of my favorite junk shops here in Dallas.

The altar candles were a house-warming gift…as was the “Red 5” votive.

The Woodrow Wilson patch I found on a Letterman’s jacket in the street while walking the dog one day……actually the jacket was pretty unwearable, but it had several great patches on it.

My brother the military expert tells me that the Guadalcanal patch is a replica of the one the first marines to step foot on the island were given. Although mine is bullion. That pillow was a Christmas gift from dear friends…pretty sure that I would grab it if the house were on fire.

After the Doberman, of course.

The horn bowl on the table next to it has some interesting things in it…….Some milagros, a clay and horsehair bear from New Mexico, a bundle of sage …. and, umm, a couple of dog skulls.

The far wall has the entertainment center, of course aimed at the sofa and kitchen.

One can never have enough books….they are just so decorative. “Don’t you think?”

I really hate TVs that dominate the room, but our’s seems pretty integrated into all the crap around it…. when it’s on, it’s almost like it’s just another picture on the wall.

I’m a firm believer that there can never be enough pictures of James Dean in a house….and the rodeo poster is one of my all time favorite prints.

Ohh, and another crucifix, and another Rossary……as if a Catholic lives here.

The Red lockers were an UN-freaking-believable dumpster dive find…Can you believe that someone, actually a Hermes store, would throw these away????

We I use them for storing out-of-season clothes….and the RRL boxes on top hold receipts and other boring paperwork….Remember the ceramic Doberman we found at a thrift store last summer? He fits just fine in that little nook.

And this concludes the tour of our den…..

Please keep all comments on a positive note.

Thank You,

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There’s a Christmas story in the “Little House on the Prairie” series where Laura and her sisters are worried that Santa won’t be able to make it through a blizzard and fill their stockings. After a series of 1800’s style tribulations, he finally does visit, only to leave each girl a tin cup, and an orange, and a penny. Are you kidding me? A tin cup? An orange? A Freaking penny? When I read this as a 10 year-old I was completely terrified. How could Santa possibly be that cruel? If the girls had only had stockings as “rockingly cool” as ours…they prolly would have made a better haul……

We use a lot of beacon blanket fabrics at work and I constantly save the scraps. I have been told that I am a tremendous pack-rat (read: hoarder). This past week I’ve been making Navajo pillows for the store windows…and each pillow I make leaves a perfect 10 by 24 inch strip of fabric left over. For Christmas this year, I thought I would make stockings from these strips.

I can sew a pretty mean straight line, but curves are a bit of a different story….so I go real slow. I started with a 99cent poly stocking from a dollar store and used it as a template for my own….

I used cream fur for the mostly red stockings, and black “Mongolian lamb-ish” fur for the black one with the heartbeat line. I had planned on using sheared wool or Mongolian lamb for the trim along the top…..but unfortunately JoAnn’s fabrics only had polyester carnival furs, (Big sigh). No worries, I can always switch the trim to real fur in the future.